Florida Buys back the Everglades

While I am never short of information to post here, as there is so much going on in the world of conservation, environmental concerns, and my own wildlife watching, occasionally I pick up on a story that I have to refrain from talking about. This often is more to do with protecting the area or ecosystem, but on occasion it is just that the facts are not clear. It was such a story that I first got sketchy information on about six months ago. An American agricultural company were selling off all its land because with Climate Change brining higher sea levels the company would lose all its assets.

While I dug as far as I could, I kept on coming up against barriers. While I could not confirm the story, I also could not dismiss it either. Especially as the commodity that was being grown was sugar. With the drive in the US for producing Ethanol, essentially alcohol from sugars, everyone I spoke to could not understand any part of US Agri-Business leaving the sector at this time, unless they knew something we didn't. When I suggested to my contacts that it could be because of impending Sea level rise, while they accepted that something of that sort could be the only justification for this happening, I also faced the same sceptical attitude about how real Climate Change is.

Now, today on the NPR Environment Podcast, there was a story that The United States Sugar Corporation has sold the State of Florida one hundred eighty seven thousand acres of land, thats over three hundred square miles, in the Everglades for $1.7 billion

While the slant given to the story was that this was a great boost to the restoration programme that has been going on for the last nine years, no one could understand why this had happened.

While I personally am more than happy to see this land brought back into the unique ecology of the Everglades, the state has been misled into paying a premium for the land. However, what the state of Florida has done via this land purchase is provide land that will be needed to mitigate the effect of a rising sea level. Therefore, while they may have paid top dollar now, the people in that region will come to see this as money well spent, as restoring the Everglades will help prevent the loss of homes and lives when the sea does rise.